Sonic Lost World

I'm a Sonic apologist. Both Adventure games are guilty pleasures of mine, Sonic Generations was one of my favorite games of 2011, and I have a sick fascination with Sonic 2006 that somehow results in me loving how awful it is. On a sliding number scale I'd say I think it's entirely possible for any new Sonic game to be highly enjoyable, but I also don't want Sonic to make love to me. That's about where I stand, and I think it's important to establish all of this so I have some credibility when I say Sonic Lost World is thoroughly not fun to play.

But I'll start with the few things I liked. For one, the game is very pretty and full of bright, pleasant colors. Many of the enemies are based on old badniks from the 16 bit days. They look great and fully realized. The animation is very expressive and clever, with a squash-and-stretch cartoony style while avoiding awful cgi-cartoon tropes such as glassy, humanlike eyes on cartoon animals. Tonally the game hits what I feel is the correct note for Sonic. From the Dreamcast and up to 2006, Sonic games had a very cringey, anime-inspired over-earnestness that never fit well with a bunch of anthropomorphic animals that look like they fell out of the 1930s. More recently, Sonic Boom came around and swung too far in the other direction with cringey, Family Guy-inspired over-irreverence. Lost World follows the lead set by a small string of previous games in the series: Sonic Unleashed, Colors, and Generations, in that it feels like a cringey Saturday morning cartoon for children starring a wise-cracking talking animal. This is a long winded way of saying that I got no entertainment value from the cutscenes or characters, but at least they feel stupid in a correct way. Additionally, the music isn't half bad. I think it might be ska? I don't really know what ska is.

As for what doesn't work, a good place to start would be the controls and the physics. The control mappings are needlessly complicated. Most blatantly, you need to hold down the trigger to run despite there being no reason to not-run ever. Jumping tanks your forward momentum, which makes jumping from platform to platform unsatisfying and imprecise. There is a double jump that kills your momentum even more, but it is produced by pressing the jump button in mid-air, which is also how you do a homing attack towards the nearest enemy. The result is that pressing the jump button twice to do either action will often result in the other one happening instead. The homing attack now has a cartoonish wind-up animation that plays before it shoots you forward, which looks nice, but also slows down the game's flow considrably. There's a rolling move Sonic can perform by pressing one of the principal face buttons ("X" on my 360 pad) that seemingly serves no purpose. You're vulnerable during the roll and it does not make you go faster in any way. I don't know why it's in the game.

There's a parkour system in place, and I likewise do not understand why it is in the game. Coming into contact with a wall or obstacle while holding down the run trigger will cause Sonic to 'stick' to it and either clamber higher or run across it laterally depending on the angle of approach. It doesn't work particularly well, it feels unwieldy, and rarely comes in useful. It's honestly more of a hindrance than anything else-- it mostly serves as a way to get stuck up on walls unintentionally.

Holding down the left trigger charges Sonic's classic spindash. Releasing the trigger is supposed to shoot Sonic forward across the ground in ball-form, destroying everything in his path. What actually happens when you let go of the trigger is that Sonic rolls forward a few inches, comes out of the roll, and ends up getting hit by the enemy you were trying to spin into. That's because you have to have the trigger held down for the spin dash to continue! You might be wondering, "Wait, you have to let go of the trigger to stop charging the attack, but you need to keep the trigger held down for the attack to keep going? How does that work?!" It works awkwardly, to be honest. What the game actually recommends is that you: hold down the left trigger to charge up the attack, release the trigger to initiate the attack, and then quickly press and hold down the left trigger again to keep the attack going. It's more than a little convoluted for a move Sonic's been doing since 1992.

The game is very poor about telling you exactly how to use such 'advanced' moves as the spindash or parkour. For example, to learn anything about how the spindash works, one must be located within a specific area in the first level of the second world, notice that a small question mark icon has appeared in the bottom left corner (with no accompanying sound effect or animation), and then press a button to view the tooltip with no foreshadowing regarding what the subject of the tip will be. I don't exactly miss the annoying tutorial characters from previous Sonic games, but a cartoon hedgehog game for children should probably not throw players into the deep end with easy-to-miss explanations of its overly-complicated control schemes.

Conceptually, Lost World takes a lot of cues from Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D Land/World. Many levels take place on planetoids, while others take a more boxy and isometric approach. The implementation leaves a lot to be desired, however. If we take it as a given that Sonic games are meant to be fast then the often-tubular planetoids, with their wild horizon lines, distorted geometry, and tricky gravity, are generally too difficult to read and process quickly. Without many of Mario Galaxy's important visual cues (such as black holes to indicate dangerous falls) you're left lacking the feedback you need. The 3D World inspired levels don't fare much better, but for very different reasons. The camera chosen for these levels is somewhat top-down and is locked in this position. Unfortunately it also leaves little in the way of depth perception, making jumps and enemy avoidance awkward in a way that feels like a bad throwback to the likes of Sonic 3D Blast. These levels are also quite wide, leading to the age old 3D Sonic problem wherein bypassing obstacles and enemies is a much better strategy than interacting with them in any way.

This is doubly true in Sonic Lost World, because the enemies here are a huge pain in the ass. They simply do a poor job of telegraphing both their activities and their defenses, and generally interrupt the flow of the game-- again, flow is important in a Sonic game. When you see a new enemy it's always unclear whether doing a homing jump attack will hurt it or you. Will rolling work? Hard to say! One grasshopper unicycle robot enemy grabbed me when I tried to attack it, but only sometimes. Whatever! Here's a pro tip: my time spent playing Lost World was pretty much a constant string of getting hit and then using the invincibility frames to carry me forward. I feel like that's a better strategy for maintaining one's momentum than actually trying to engage with any of the challenges anyway. Many of the enemy and obstacle placement is oriented in a way that punishes players for going fast, which blows my mind. I get it, a game needs obstacles. But there's obstacles and there's incentivizing the player to do the opposite of what your game is supposed to be. There is no need for so many instant death traps and bottomless pits. There's one part where Sonic died because I ran into a wall too quickly and he did a comical 'splat' animation and all I could think was: Bubsy. Is that what you want, Sonic Lost World? To be compared to Bubsy? Well there you go, Sonic Lost World. You got it.

And then there are things that just make no sense, like gimmick levels where you slowly roll around as a snowball while everything in the world conspires to push you off of narrow beams. It just makes no sense, and if you've been paying attention that's a bit of a running theme. The levels are convoluted and confusing, the controls are convoluted and confusing, the challenges are convoluted and confusing... I'm a grown ass man and I spent most of my time with Sonic Lost World completely confused. I found myself shouting, "WHAT?!" at the screen every time something inscrutable happened, which was often. This game is actually a pretty good lesson in how more can be less. I'm still hopeful for a repeat of Sonic Generations' surprising high quality. I just hope they Keep It Simple, Sonic.